Would be nice if equipment which is based on a breakthrew/new tech would have fancier effects than the "usual" representative.

Say railguns are a common occurence around the area and their effects look baseline/meh. Not from being the common weapon around but per graphics design.

And then someone develops gauss cannons/plasma cannons/mcguffin throwers with the first few generations having awesome stats (because new tech with untapped potential) and also with especially fancy effects before slowly "degenerating" to normal/meh effect levels.

Could be useful or at least interesting: Area of possible positions [time to hit] later. For craft with low agility, this is roughly equivalent to the aimpoint. But for high-agility vessels (like fighters), it could be a significantly different shape representing the possible position given convolutions of trajectory. It'll also make it quite clear that you need faster muzzle velocities for hitting faster targets, since they could be anywhere by the time your round would hit.

Silverware wrote:
From what I am reading, all of your arguments here are based on a bad estimation of the target's location...
Unless you have some fancy ass-concept you are currently failing to explain?

no, not from the lack of precision.
all im saying that depending on the bullet speed and target speed and geometry the effective cross section would be larger than just placing a copy of the object as target marker.
because you can hit the front (the area that is in movement direction) area of the target even if you are to the side of the target.
making the projection incomplete.

a complete target area would be a transform that projects all the potentially hittable area onto the sphere of the targettable area.
front, sides, all

Silverware wrote:
From what I am reading, all of your arguments here are based on a bad estimation of the target's location...
Unless you have some fancy ass-concept you are currently failing to explain?

no, not from the lack of precision.
all im saying that depending on the bullet speed and target speed and geometry the effective cross section would be larger than just placing a copy of the object as target marker.
because you can hit the front (the area that is in movement direction) area of the target even if you are to the side of the target.
making the projection incomplete.

a complete target area would be a transform that projects all the potentially hittable area onto the sphere of the targettable area.
front, sides, all

Oh I see what you are saying now.
Including volume into the equation. Not something that is easily achieved.

Silverware wrote:
Including volume into the equation. Not something that is easily achieved.

Will depend upon the speed of the shots if that is an issue or not.

well, one could map the lead points for all (very highly LOD'd) vertices and then render their connecting polygons as the total targetting area.
would provide the "full" set of targettable area, although overdefined.

as an addition we could also mark subsystems on the aimmap and trivialise aiming at subsystems with that.
you dont have to select the turret, you just aim at it on the mapping.